I want to tell you about a show I’m bringing to libraries, bookstores, and small venues this spring — because it’s unlike anything I’ve done before, and because the story of how it came to exist is part of what makes it worth coming to.
It’s called Being Jonas Wilder.
Here’s the short version
Over the course of about forty years, I wrote somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred songs. Some of them were good. Some were craft exercises. Some I’m glad nobody heard. They came from all kinds of places — joy, heartbreak, observation, frustration, the need to make something out of what I was living through.
But here’s what I didn’t know while I was writing them: eleven of those songs, when you place them together in a specific sequence, produce something none of them produce on their own. Not a collection. Not a greatest hits. A map. A map of something every human being navigates — the journey from the voice you were born with, through everything the world does to talk you out of it, and back.
I couldn’t see that map while I was living it. I had to write a novel first.
The novel that changed everything
The novel is called The Echo and the Voice, written under my pen name J.W. Kindbloom. The central character is Jonas Wilder — a musician who spends forty years navigating the tension between what he was born to do and what the world kept asking him to become instead. Jonas is fictional. But only barely.
Writing that novel gave me something I hadn’t expected: hindsight. The act of placing forty years of living on a timeline and finding the through-line — the pattern — revealed which of my songs had always belonged together, and why. Those eleven songs became an album called Songs in the Key of Return. And the sequence they’re in is not random. It is the map.
What the show actually is
Being Jonas Wilder is an intimate performance — part concert, part memoir, part conversation. I play songs from the album and tell the stories behind them. Not the polished version. The real one. The bench under the flickering streetlamp in New Jersey where I wrote one of them at 25, trying to remember why I started. The campfire in the Everglades where another one came together while I was reading everything I could get my hands on and slowly understanding that my confusion wasn’t a personal failing — it was the predictable result of something much older and much larger than any one life.
The show runs about an hour in its library and bookstore format, where I present five of the eleven songs with their stories. There’s also a full version — all eleven songs, the complete arc — for venues that want the deeper experience.
Each song gets three things: the story of how it arrived, the song itself, and then a reflection on what I understand about it now that I couldn’t have known when I wrote it. The songs are woven together with narration that covers the ground between them — the years, the roads, the people, the questions that got bigger the longer I stayed with them.
By the time the last song plays — Tulips Don’t Wait, a poem I wrote on a napkin at eight years old and finished forty years later — the audience understands why it’s last. And what it means that it’s last.
Why I’m doing this now
I spent a long time writing songs for rooms without knowing what they were for. I knew they mattered. I didn’t know why, or for whom, or in what order, until I wrote the novel and looked back.
Now I know. And the only thing that makes sense is to take this into the rooms where people are already paying a particular kind of attention — bookstores, libraries, coffeehouses, small arts venues — and let the songs do what I’ve watched them do for forty years. Uncover something in the person listening that they hadn’t known was buried.
A man came up to me after a show in South Carolina once, while I was wrapping my cables. He said: “I don’t know what’s happening to me. But I think I’ve been asleep most of my life.” His name was Stephen. Ten years later he found me again to show me what had become possible on the other side of that moment.
I wrote the last song on the album because of Stephen. His story was the missing piece.
Every room has a Stephen in it. That’s why I’m going to the rooms.
Come find me
Being Jonas Wilder is touring libraries, bookstores, and small venues starting May 2026. The full eleven-song version is also in development to be available for larger venues and presenting organizations.
For tour dates, booking information, and to sign up for updates, visit the Creative Humanity Alliance at creativehumanityalliance.org/experience-it-live/.
The album Songs in the Key of Return is available on all streaming platforms. The novel The Echo and the Voice by J.W. Kindbloom is available in paperback and e-reader wherever books are sold. The companion book The Lens That Changes Everything is also available — it’s essentially what happened when the song Where Did We Come From needed more room than a song could hold.
If any of this sounds like something you’ve been waiting for without knowing what to call it — come. There’s a seat at the wall, and the tulips are already up.
— Mark Firehammer